Gods and Monsters

Film of the Month: Spirited Away

Andrew Osmond salutes Spirited Away, a Japanese animation film that
mixes fairytale surrealism with a belief in empowerment through labour

Spirited Away (Sen To Chihiro No Kamikakushi), a Japanese animated fantasy
about a little girl's adventures in a realm of gods and monsters, invites comparisons
to the Alice books, The Wizard of Oz and even Harry Potter. First and foremost,
though, this remarkable film is embedded in the personal universe of its auteur-director
Hayao Miyazaki, whose standing in Japan is comparable to Steven Spielberg's
or, indeed, J.K. Rowling's in the west. From its opening in 2001, Spirited
Away has become the biggest Japanese release in history. It is also the most
successful 'foreign' film ever made, with the bulk of its revenue earned in
its native country. The film shared the Golden Bear at last year's Berlin festival,
followed by an Oscar for best animated feature. It is released in Britain both
dubbed and subtitled, the dub produced by Disney and directed by Kirk Wise,
who co-directed Beauty and the Beast and Atlantis The Lost Empire.

It's the baggage Spirited Away carries as a Miyazaki film that may bewilder
British audiences. The director's previous film, the medieval fantasy Princess
Mononoke (1997), is available on UK video, but to steal a phrase often applied
to Woody Allen, both it and Spirited Away depart from Miyazaki's early, funny
pictures. Not that Spirited Away is humourless it has some splendid gags but
it's deeply recursive, uniting themes and images from across the director's
past work. To take the most obvious example, the soot-sprites that toil in
the boiler room of the spider-man Kamaji here appear in a different role in
Miyazaki's My Neighbour Totoro (1988), while many other elements form part
of what might be called Miyazaki-land: his fascination with flight, ecology,
elaborate buildings, strong girls, weary gods, overbuilt machinery, empowering
labour, even the pigs heroine Chihiro's gluttonous parents turn into. Spirited
Away is not a sequel or spin-off, yet it's part of a one-man brand some western
critics gloss as that exoticising standby, inscrutable orientalism.

Then again, the film's opening demonstrates the cross-cultural universality
of fairy tales. A family wanders, or is lured, into a magic place where the
parents eat tempting food and turn into pigs. Miyazaki cites Japanese folk
tales as his influence here, but one could equally invoke Hansel and Gretel
or Circe in Homer's Odyssey (a work referenced by Miyazaki in the past). The
first minutes slide from normality to unease to menace as Chihiro's unwitting
parents poke round what they think is a theme-park recreation of old Japan.
The crescendo climaxes as the sun sets, the lanterns glow, and Chihiro finds
her parents grotesquely transformed. She's not just scared, she's revolted,
grossed-out; her body wriggles with nausea before she breaks and runs. The
scene evokes the darker moments of classic Disney but with more edge than Walt's
balletically styled terrors. Then with barely a pause the mood switches as
the heroic boy Haku takes charge, pulling the hapless girl on a dizzy dash
to a bathhouse patronised by gods and spirits (where most of the film is set).
The delicacy of the score by Joe Hisaishi (a regular musician for live-action
director Kitano Takeshi) gives way to bolder strokes la John Williams, announcing
a transition to high adventure.

From here on the audience is at Chihiro's eye-level, to sink or swim in a
fantasy world somewhere between Wonderland and Harry Potter's Hogwarts, less
soap-bubble surreal than the first, more quirkily digressive than the second.
Here a spider-man works beside walking frogs and soot-balls with eyes, but
there are also boilers, elevators, even an amphibious train. The bathhouse
is furnished in lavish mosaic detail, from the painted partitions to the patterns
on the cushions. No doubt this reflects the director's expressed desire to
do justice to Japan's design heritage the bathhouse blends architecture from
various periods ? but then Miyazaki has always been a craftsman of imagined
space, creating eminently explorable, 'solid' drawn worlds that owe little
to Spirited Away's fairly sparse CG effects. Miyazaki's worldbuilding has been
compared to that of some videogame adventures, which also depend on first-person
exploration, but analogies are legion, from the baroque-gothic labyrinths of
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast to the play-worlds of Rupert the Bear.

Initially Chihiro stumbles through her world, hurtling down steep stairs and
being magically yanked across hallways. Her switch to active protagonist is
signalled in the second half, when she hitches up her worker's uniform, runs
along a treacherous metal pipe that nearly drops her to her doom, then climbs
the bathhouse to the top. What causes this change? Miyazaki's answer is hard
work, but of a different order from the jovial capitalism of Disney's dwarves.
One of the director's most popular earlier films, Kiki's Delivery Service (1989),
was about a teen witch making flying deliveries while coping with adolescence.
Spirited Away has a similarly offbeat work regime with Chihiro tending Japanese
gods and learning responsibility and purpose. This has less to do with stereotypes
of the industrious Japanese than with Miyazaki's own leftist leanings and belief
in empowerment through labour. What makes it more than dreary moralism are
the witty riffs on the theme. Chihiro's first trial is to help a soot-sprite
carry unnaturally heavy lumps of coal; she succeeds, only for all its co-workers
to drop their burdens before her en masse.

Later the bathhouse manager Yubaba (a huge-headed matriarch seemingly modelled
on the Duchess in Tenniel's Alice illustrations) tries to steal Chihiro's name
and identity. However, instead of depicting the girl's new job as dehumanised
drudgery, Miyazaki turns it into a heroic, Herculean struggle. As Chihiro strives
to clean a stinking gloop-god, stumbling, banging her head, trudging through
faecal slime, there's a palpable sense of the once weak girl building an identity
through toil, redefining the labour as her own. Eventually the bathhouse inmates
rally to help her in a multi-species display of worker unity, but it's she
who stands alone at the end as the revealed deity intones a transcendent "Well
done". Meanwhile Yubaba's doppelganger Zeniba lives in a thatched farmhouse
pursuing handicrafts, while Yubaba's giant baby, now a mouse, becomes a comic
proponent of unalienated labour.

At the farmhouse Zeniba gives the characters an Alice-style tea party, which
fits with the film's recurring images of eating, cleansing and purging. These
range from the sublime (a storm that leaves the bathhouse surrounded by sea)
to the outrageous (the monstrous No-face burying Yubaba in a diarrhoea-like
avalanche of vomit). A passing mention of Japan's 'bubble' economy, with its
associations of national indulgence, foreshadows the gluttony of No-face and
Chihiro's parents, not to mention the great baby ensconced among painted mountains
and palaces, refusing to go out for fear of "bad germs". Thematically,
this marshalling of motifs and images is sound; more contentious is the film's
narrative structure, which introduces new characters and strands half way through
while leaving Chihiro's parents almost forgotten in the mix. It's an eccentricity
that may not have been fully intended by Miyazaki, who reportedly altered his
story outline in mid-production. Yet it makes aesthetic sense why shouldn't
Chihiro's adventures wrongfoot the audience? The unpredictability can be wearing
but also bracing, an antidote to the pat rollercoaster climaxes of such animations
as Monsters, Inc.

Disney's dub (featuring Lilo voice-actress Daveigh Chase as Chihiro) is a
creditable effort, though it lacks the spontaneity of original animation soundtracks
and some of the 'extra' voices are weak. Western audiences may chafe at the
sub-Disney frame rate (much of the animation is done on 'threes', or eight
distinct frames a second) and the cartoon acting can't match that of the best
US studios. That said, Chihiro's fearful, clinging behaviour is well observed,
while her character design with a thin gawky body and pipe-cleaner legs is
inspired. In any case, cartoon acting was never the sine qua non of Miyazaki's
films, which are built instead on heightened situations and sublime fantasy
landscapes. Even if CG cartoons come to dominate Japan as they do much of the
world, there's a corner of the animation field that will be forever Miyazaki.